We're all pretty clear on this now, I think. People like to get mashed, and TV producers like to turn their cameras on people getting mashed. It's been happening since before people even knew how to get mashed properly. Panorama was getting bang on it in 1955 with a film of Christopher Mayhew MP mashed out of his skull on mescaline. Performing mental arithmetic in a wingback chair, hands neatly folded in his lap, it was considered too wild to be broadcast.

Nowadays, we're used to seeing people using drugs on TV. But usually it's gurning clubbers spewing out of clubs and onto their arses in Ayia Napa or (if it's one of those police shows) Reading. Channel 4, though, is about to try and reinvent the spirit of Big Chrissy M. Its new series Drugs Live is a practical study of the active ingredient in ecstasy, MDMA, only 20 years after most people have stopped freaking out about it. Volunteers – Keith Allen and Lionel Shriver among them – will neck pills and undergo tests in the name of proper real science. To prove to us (and Ofcom) that the programme isn't a blunt stab at sensationalism, the makers will be using squiggly scan results and peering into patients' eyes, the rhythmic clunking of an MRI machine the closest anyone will get to a rave.

Televised drug trials sound like the stuff of TV dreams, particularly if there's a chance that the subjects' heads will suddenly explode like microwave popcorn, and it's not hard to imagine a future where Channel 4 is the biggest funder of medical research, viewers red-buttoning the route of endoscopy cameras when nothing good is on TV. Exploding popcorn heads are disappointingly rare, however, and recreational mash-heads gloriously abundant.

The problem is that there's a reason people take party drugs at night, in the dark, to music you can't have a conversation to. Whatever door of perception that pill is machine-gunning off its hinges, blathering on about the experience through clenched teeth is tedium squared to anyone sober. Anybody that's been talked into a corner by someone off their spangly little tits on Es will have shuddered at the thought of an hour-long exploration of the subject. If you've sat through any of Keith Allen's documentary offerings you'll be shuddering your central nervous system out at the thought of him chemically buoyed to get even more of a buzz from the sound of his own voice than usual. In the Venn diagram of entertaining voyeurism and TV experiments, the intersection is occupied by swivel-eyed bores who'd be better off doing their thing in the dark with the music turned up.